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Peter Carey's fictions explore the experiences lurking in the cracks of normality, and are inhabited by hybrid characters living in between spaces or on the margins. Carey took a circuitous route into literature and writing. Characterising Carey's stories takes us to the heart of his fictional practice. Most adopt a mixture of narrative modes, a central feature of his writing. In Carey stories, terminal societies trap characters in drive-in movie car parks, or offer the bizarre possibility of exchanging bodies, or generate a counter-revolutionary resistance movement led by fat men. Grouping the stories around themes and issues allows for a fairly comprehensive insight into Carey's shorter works, and provides some key threads for later discussions of the longer fiction. Four of the most significant areas are: American imperialism and culture; capitalism; power and authority; and gender. In Bliss, the hippy capitalists of 'War Crimes' are replaced by the more conventional scenario of hippies versus capitalists. Illywhacker examines twentieth-century Australian history with the savage humour and fantasy of the earlier fiction now placed within an epic framework. Oscar and Lucinda might be termed 'retro-speculative' fiction. The Tax Inspector is Carey's most savage novel to date, and it captures Marx's vision of the ravening effects of capital. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith marks a return to the overt alternative world-building found in the early stories with their fantastic and fable-like scenarios. The overlap between post-modernism and post-colonialism in Carey has been investigated by a number of critics.
Here on the outposts of the American Empire … ( Bliss , 9) C AREY ’s first published novel capitalised on the success of his stories to exhilarating effect. Its anarchic narratology puzzled many reviewers, 1 but as Carey’s œuvre grows, its mix of satiric realism, fable, fantasy and manic cartoon quality seem entirely characteristic. After War Crimes was awarded the New South Wales Premier Award in 1980, Bliss received the same prize in 1982, as well as the Miles Franklin and the National Book Council
power-crazed psychopathic business world of ‘War Crimes’, but with the unsettling awareness that this is no longer fantasy. Carey paints a vitriolic portrait of social decay and disintegration, the collapse of communal ethics and the sheer rapacity of the business world consequent upon the global market economy of the late 1980s. As in Bliss , he links together two areas of urgent concern, rampant capitalism and child sexual abuse. Abuse in the family is seen in relation to wider failures of social responsibility manifest in the corrupt abuses of power and wealth in
of the commonplace as in the story ‘Ultra-Violet Light’ in which the narrator describes his mother as being ‘amused by novelties: foaming soap pads, oriental games with indecipherable characters, bird baths with unusual characteristics, plans for tourism involving apples’ ( War Crimes , 156). Although the exploration of ideas tends to dominate, the stories are not lacking in characterisation. Indeed, Carey became ‘more and more interested in the characters’, 7 particularly the longer stories such as ‘The Fat Man in History’, ‘War Crimes’ or ‘The Chance’, where the
of War Crimes , who placed it alongside the Australian publication of Borges’s The Book of Sand , 9 although in terms of overt influence, Carey has declared himself fortunate to have read Borges ‘later rather than earlier’. 10 There has been diverse criticism examining the post-modern playfulness and self-conscious fictionality of Carey’s work. Helen Daniel’s reading of Illywhacker is, in common with the rest of her book Liars , dedicated single-mindedly to the playful strategy of the novelist/narrator as liar and the fabricatory
generate wealth while making nothing new’ (561). If Herbert and Charles’s dreams and visions were compromised by their dependency on American finance, Hissao represents a new phase of the neo-colonialism of Australia in the form of Japanese finance: he is an entrepreneurial whiz-kid of a kind that the 1980s became familiar with, ‘decadent’ and ‘tough’ (585). The impact of this is revealed by contrasting the opening of the novel with its final scenes. The scenario of the ending has much in common with ‘War Crimes’ and ‘American Dreams’, and with
and found himself in London during the decisive period of 1968–70, supporting himself with periods of advertising copywriting while absorbing the cultural fervour of the hippy ethos. The counter-cultural ethic had an ongoing impact on him through later experiences as a member of an alternative community. It appears in works as varied as ‘War Crimes’, Bliss and The Tax Inspector , often ironised or questioned. At the same time, he was working on ‘this very maniacal and highly mandarin novel which out-Becketted Beckett and out-Robbe-Grilleted Robbe-Grillet’. 31
to orbit the moon’ (53). The end of one era – Adolf Eichmann’s trial for Nazi war crimes – becomes confused with the emergence of another – the space race – and this is in keeping with the novel’s presentation of an explicitly Baudrillardian discourse of history when, at a dinner party, Dorian states ‘Of course, the Gulf War never really happened’ (143), which glosses an earlier claim made in the
World War II, but following the war, crime and horror comic books eclipsed superheroes in popularity. Many publishers naturally pursued what was selling, abandoning the superhero genre for tales of terror and crime. As Lance Eaton puts it, ‘An entire generation of readers had grown up with superheroes and light-hearted fare, but the brutalities of war meant that the more gentle comic books of the late 1930s and 1940s would not engage an audience’ (19). However, while the content of comic books was maturing, if you will, the reputation of the industry for producing
, they summon the spirit of an SS officer named Gloria, who is arrested and charged with Hannela’s murder. However, while freely cataloguing her war crimes, Gloria refuses to take responsibility for Hannela’s death. Like Richard Bradshaw, Hannela remains a totemic presence, her body providing or overshadowing the context in which others enter the dramatic arena. Like Susan Bradshaw, Ilona has submitted to the embrace of a murderer to survive, acting as the mistress of Heydrich; survival is equated not only with sexual submission but also with the temporary surrender of